


Systems of Exchange

by Tequila_Mockingbird



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Ballet, Character Study, Gen, Natasha Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 17:25:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6816631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tequila_Mockingbird/pseuds/Tequila_Mockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Natalia is three years old, she takes her first ballet class. When Natasha breaks the conditioning, almost twenty years later, she wonders when she learned how to dance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Systems of Exchange

**Author's Note:**

> Warning that this is a hodgepodge of comics, MCU, and my personal headcanons for combining the two of them.

_When Natalia is three years old, she takes her first ballet class. A dozen or so little girls, hair scraped back into buns, shoes still soft._ Plié, relevé. _And again. And again. Straighten your back, Miss Romanovna. At the end of the class, as a special treat, they are all herded down the hall to watch the big girls practice, pointe shoes and sweat-soaked leotards and professional smiles on their faces. Natalia stares, entranced, not at the girls doing fancy footwork in the center of the room, a series of flashy_ temps levé sauté _and some_ battement frappé, _but at the girls in the back, working on the barre. One girl in particular, the tallest one, with her ankle propped up, arching her whole spine over into her arm, a perfect, impossible curve. Natalia can’t do that. She can’t do any of the things these girls are doing, but the other things she knows she can learn--she’s not dumb, or clumsy. Already she’s learning that her body will do what she needs it to do, if she practices enough. If she wants_ enough _._

_But what this girl is doing isn’t just her body--it’s a stretch, yes, Natalia can see that. But it’s also... the girl looks like she just gave up. Like she lost something forever, like she’s falling upward. Like it hurts, but she’s doing it on purpose. Like she doesn’t even care. Switching sides. Straightening up, now, to join the rest, and she’s better than any of them. Natalia wants to learn how to do_ that. 

When Natasha breaks the conditioning, almost twenty years later, that memory bothers her more than anything else. If it wasn’t ever real--not the ballet, not the fire and Uncle Ivan--then where had she seen that girl, the arch of that spine, that absolute triumphant surrender of a curve? She can’t have invented it. And they wouldn’t have thought to invent it for her. 

So she was never a dancer. Odd. Because she is one now; Natasha has toe-shoes and _zakolka_ and _fouetté jeté_  inscribed into her bones, has been breathing through pain since she was three years old. Or maybe she hasn’t, but the mind is a subjective place, so she rolls with it. Breaths through it. Levels out. 

Natasha doesn’t know when or how she was trained to resist interrogation--well. That’s a lie. She knows that she wasn’t. Resistance isn’t her style. Bend or you break. And Natasha has never been the ‘breaking’ type. 

The best way to resist interrogation is not to resist it. The best way to resist interrogation is not to care. So Natasha lets you in--lets you hurt her. Hurts. But she never stops watching you, interrogating you right back. 

Dancing. Show them the pain and they never seem to notice that you’re still moving. Natasha very rarely tells lies. 

It’s so much easier to deceive people with the truth. 

She’s never really understood why people are so afraid of pain. It is what it is. And it’s never seemed a particularly high price to pay in exchange for what she wants. 

_Natalia watches for the girl, in between lessons. Sees her sometimes in the hallways, refilling a water bottle or rewrapping an ankle, lying on the ground with her legs straight up. Sneaks away and watches the girl practice, practice, practice,_ battement fondu, pas de poisson. _Watches her stretch. Surrender. Smile through the pain. Keep dancing. Watches her take off toe shoes and sigh at the blood staining the toe pad. Retape her feet. Put them back on and keep dancing._

_Natalia learns to breathe. To take the pain and turn it into the dance, fill the dance with it, use it up. Natalia learns to jump as if she’s never going to hit the floor again, to spin as if that is her natural habitat, to do it all with bloody bandages wrapped around her toes, with aching hips, with bruises on her skull from how tight the pins were jammed in, with perfect turnout. She learns to make pain look effortless. Look beautiful._

_When Natalia was nine years old, the dance mistress had looked at her and said, “this one might do well.” She hugged that to herself for weeks and weeks, carried it warm within cupped hands. She might do well._

Natasha wonders if that one really happened. If she really happened. Sometimes, alone in an anonymous city, she finds her way into empty dance studios and stands at the barre. Warms up. Dances. She still remembers all the old combinations, does a run of _chaînés_  down the room to prove to herself that she knows how. That whatever else happened when she was young, she did learn to dance. She knows how to dance. She is a dancer, before or after or next to everything else that she is. 

Ballerinas are very rarely beautiful. They are sweet-looking little girls, and sometimes attractive right up until puberty, but that is when it stops. A ballerina at rest is not beautiful. A ballerina is beautiful when she is dancing. 

Natasha is beautiful. This is not arrogance or wishful thinking--she doesn’t lie to herself like that. She doesn’t lie to herself at all. And she knows that she does not have the body of a dancer. Her ankles are not wrecked enough, her toes, if pedicured, could pass for those of society housewife--and they have, on some missions. She carries her weight like a fighter, muscles designed to flip and twist rather than to spin. 

But still she dances--still she remembers combinations, flicks into _fouettés_ with the ease of muscle memory, rubs the thought of bruises into her hips. So what is it that makes a ballerina? 

_Natalia remembers seeing a girl fall, hard and wrong and fast, the crack of a broken leg echoing sickeningly through the room; she remembers the sudden hush that fell over them all. The strange premonition of disaster, watching a girl her own age be carried out, sobbing, knowing that she wouldn’t dance again._

_And Natalia stands at the barre and wonders whether it will be her, one day, who cannot ever dance again, who is reduced to sitting in a chair and hating all the girls who are better than she is. It’s a fate that comes to everyone, sooner or later. You cannot dance forever._

_Natalia wonders if she will be like her teachers, a terrifyingly upright_ madame _with hair scraped back and hawk’s eyes, mouth thin and bitter with the betrayal of her body. Wonders if she won’t even be that lucky; if she will fade into obscurity and end up teaching some spoiled little girls_ ballet blanc _for the rest of her life, far away from any real talent._

_Wonders if, worse than all of that, she’ll stop dancing, someday. Stop for good._

Natasha doesn’t think much about retirement. SHIELD agents don’t usually live long enough. 

_Natalia never caught that girl’s name, that impossible girl whom she’d watched in corridors and mirrors. She transferred to the upper school, or her mama got a different job and they moved to Moscow, or she ran off with a boy--Natalia was never sure._

_After a while, Natalia forgot her, mostly. Brought her to mind only at the deepest point of an impossible bend, that perfect sacrifice singing through her veins._

When Natasha was twenty-six, Clint got her tickets to the Mariinsky Ballet’s _Giselle_ for her birthday. It wouldn’t be her birthday for another five months, and they went in character and undercover, did a little bit of light reconnaissance before the curtain rose on a rich couple in the balcony seats who may or may not have had mob ties. 

The girl was dancing Giselle. Her name, according to the program, was Diana Vishneva. Natasha blinked, settled back in her chair. Watched the ballet. 

She was beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> Sincerest compliments to Diana Vishneva, who is an excellent dancer and probably not a top-secret Soviet spy.


End file.
